Such dependencies are hardly surprising when one considers that Debian
has been a GNOME shop since GNOME's beginning. At the time GNOME was an
official GNU project, as I recall, and Debian was very close to being a
GNU project as well in 1998. GNOME, of course, coming into being due to
the then GPL incompatible licensing of Qt that prevented KDE from being
included into the main repository. GNU and Debian parted ways over the
latter's refusal to eliminate the contrib and non-free repositories, as
I recall.

GNOME was always preferred over any other DE and until the last couple
of releases it took some clever tricks to install a DE other than GNOME,
but, as noted, a good part of the GNOME support libraries would always
be installed. Unwinding the GNOME infection will not be easy though I
think it will be worthwhile as doing so limits the influence Red Hat
will have on Devuan.

Since I also use Slackware, I think it's useful to look over the fence
and see how Patrick Volkerding, et. al. are handling things in this
brave new world.

- Nate

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."

Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more: http://www.n0nb.us